He was doing his best to choke back his emotion. I sat in silence and waited.
We were at a local coffee shop. It was early afternoon and the lunch crowd was thinning out, but there were still plenty of stragglers around. We were discussing sales growth strategies for his company that he had been running for the past 30 years.
Things had been going gang busters at first. Sure, it was incredibly hard work, but it had paid off with a steady stream of new customers and growing sales. But then, for some unknown reason, the curve unexpectedly started to shallow and then flatline.
We explored possible reasons as to what might have happened to drastically change the growth curve. Then, suddenly, it became strikingly clear.
Tragedy struck when his son was killed in a car accident. He admitted, now years later, that his entire life had come to a screeching halt. Everything had gone numb for a solid couple of years following his son’s passing.
Now I understood. Life dealt him a tragedy, and his business experienced a “split.”
The truth is, it can happen to any one of us. Though not all of us will have our lives thrown off kilter by a catastrophic event like losing a loved one or a debilitating diagnosis, there are other less visible and more common causes to beware of.
If you are an entrepreneur, you know that the thing that drives you to take on insane amounts of risk, sacrifice and endless hard work is your belief in your cause. The conviction that your endeavor can make a dent in the universe and a positive difference in someone else’s life is like the fire inside a steam engine, which drives your wheels forward relentlessly.
As long as that belief stays front and center in the entrepreneur’s mind, all goes well. It’s not even necessary to be able to articulate it; many entrepreneurs just “follow their gut” or do things that “feel right.” And they succeed, and succeed, and succeed, watching that curve head upward — at first slowly, but then steeper and steeper. Momentum builds.
Then something happens.
There comes a point when the business has grown and the entrepreneur cannot do it alone any longer. They need help. They find partners, vendors, and eventually new team members.
Many new concerns demand their attention: hiring, marketing, insurance, liability, taxes, payroll, chasing unpaid invoices — all combined with the relentless search for new customers and the cardinal imperative of taking great care of the old ones.
For many businesses, a split occurs.
Simon Sinek describes “the split” as the moment when someone who is leading an organization loses focus on the original purpose for which it was created.
Unlike a life tragedy, which is easier to detect and understand in its ability to throw our focus off, the more likely and insidious split happens when the owner gets distracted away from the initial cause, purpose, crusade, or belief that drove that person like an obsession to found that company by the “thousand slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
The effects are seldom immediate. The company’s success and performance usually continue, sometimes for a couple of years, feeding off the power of the initial momentum. But eventually the results taper off and the growth grinds to a halt. A feeling of deep frustration sets in.
Since it has usually been some time since the actual split took place, most people start looking for the cause too late, way after it actually occurred. They tweak the marketing dials. They hire consultants. They fire salespeople and hire new ones. They invest in social media and chase every new fad they can find.
But the root cause of the problem is not in any of those areas. The answer will not be found in looking at profit, which is merely the result or the scoreboard on which the performance of the organization is measured.
In order to find the way back after a split, the entrepreneur needs to look inside. They have to get back to their roots, to the basics, to the core driving beliefs that sparked the company’s existence in the first place.
Rediscovering your organization’s purpose is a challenging process that requires courage, curiosity and the help of someone with some objectivity and perspective. But once achieved, that initial fire and drive is rekindled. Even more, it can be multiplied many times over, because it is now combined with years of experience and learning from mistakes that the initial founder had not lived yet.
If you are in the middle of a “split,” find your way back by rediscovering your roots and your organization’s Why.
